Well, 16 years almost to the day since I started my LJ, I'm shuttering it. As a queer person who posts about being queer, I can't agree to the new LJ TOS.

We've had a good run.

EDIT: I have found a way to post comments without agreeing to the TOS—use uBlock Origin to block the element that makes the screen look grey—but it won't let me post or edit any of my entries. So I'm leaving comments for people who don't use DW, and presumably the rest of you will see this. Here's how to do that, once you've installed the uBlock Origin browser plug-in:

1) Go to a comment page.

2) Right-click/cmd-click on any greyed-out area and select "Block Element".

3) It should show an element called ##.b-fader. Click "Create".

4) Ta-da, an accessible comment box. You can block the other popover elements if you want to be able to see what you're typing.

This also works for editing tags on a post, so I've screened all the comments on my top post, left a comment with my DW handle, and added tags that say "see comment for directions to dreamwidth, this livejournal is out of service". Best I can do for now.

I've also sent Support a message asking why people with paid and permanent accounts have to agree to the TOS if it doesn't apply to paid services. We'll see what happens with that. Either way I'll back up and delete everything other than a signpost, because the service is clearly dead, but I'd rather not have to click "agree" to do that.

I haven't yet closed mine because I need to figure out how to import the last few weeks of entries and comments and I need to transfer a dozen years of photography—which I would like to do without signing the new terms of service, though right now I don't see how it's possible—but it does not feel safe to me anymore and I am very unhappy about that. Dreamwidth was my backup. LJ was where I was home.

Ethically, I treat agreement under duress as no agreement at all. I therefore clicked through in order to allow ljdump to back up my remaining bits of LJ, then modified it into ljnuke and wiped everything. I have no illusions that they haven't kept copies, but I'll be damned if I'm giving them any content to serve ads on.

I agree with you ethically, but since at the present time I cannot trust the Civil Code of the Russian Federation to agree with me, I am not going to sign anything unless I can feel confident that it won't automatically dump my personal data into the hands of people I would really rather not have access to it. If nothing else, there's the thing where I am actively engaged in protesting a government with peculiar ties to theirs.

[edit] The other part of this is that I have—to the point where I have difficulty verbalizing it, interestingly—a massive screaming NO reaction to the idea of agreeing to something I find morally abhorrent even for the sake of getting out of it. I know this gets people killed in stories all the time. Certainly in history. But I do not want to tell LiveJournal under the purview of Sup Media that they have the legal right to hold me to the laws of the Russian Federation, because the laws of the Russian Federation currently prohibit the dissemination of what they call queer propaganda to the under-18 crowd, which is what I call writing about myself and one of my partners and their wife and child and most of my friends and a lot of art and since LJ is open to users aged 14 and above according to the new terms of service, God knows how much of my journal could get yanked: I don't want to say that's all right with me. It isn't. Even if it doesn't happen to me, it's not all right. I don't want to put my name to it.

I had never put anything particularly sensitive on LJ, and have been treating it as already compromised since the SUP acquisition anyway. Should I ever wind up within the jurisdiction of the CCotRF I figure that I'll have other problems anyway (like being in a country they've invaded).

LJ was almost my sole form of online interaction. I used it as a journal for myself and a way of keeping in touch with people and my sole platform as a professional writer. Losing it—unless all of my friendlist and their friendlists transfer to Dreamwidth—will lose me nearly all of my connectivity with people that isn't maintained one-to-one over e-mail. So I didn't put personal information on it in the sense of passwords or addresses or directions to my place of work, but it would hurt me to lose it. It will hurt me to lose it. That's what I mind.

Yeah. It's a shit situation, and I'm really sorry it's hitting you as severely as it is.

OTOH, I've been through enough iterations of "great online community falls victim to {apathy, purchase, technological change, invasion from Planet AOL}" that I'm somewhat inured to it; even so, this is one of the more severe cases because of the sheer fucked-up-ness of the whole Russian thing.

Minor optimistic note: in the past few years I've gotten back in touch with people I once knew on USENET in the late 1980s; I just hope it doesn't take you anywhere near that long to reconnect.

OTOH, I've been through enough iterations of "great online community falls victim to {apathy, purchase, technological change, invasion from Planet AOL}" that I'm somewhat inured to it; even so, this is one of the more severe cases because of the sheer fucked-up-ness of the whole Russian thing.

Understood. Aside from some message boards in college, I've never had another great online community: I actually joined LJ quite late, as my friend group went, and only because I was tired of finding out months after the fact that so-and-so had married or reproduced or divorced or dropped out of grad school, etc. I had quite a lot invested in it.

I am going to bow out of this conversation, if you're all right with it, because I feel like I hijacked rosefox's journal with my grieving process, and that is not very fair and just sort of emotionally wearing on everybody. I am sorry.

Hey, you keep responding to sovay's pain with your lack of pain in a way that comes across to me as pretty insensitive. If you're not feeling the same way, maybe it's time to stick with "I'm really sorry" and stop before the "OTOH".

I'd guess that, like most online terms of service, the previous iteration included the standard language of "we can change this unilaterally without notice other than updating the online copy."

The current version phrases it as "This Agreement may be amended by the Administration without special notice by publishing a new version hereof at the above URL. The new version hereof shall come into force upon its online publishing...."

So, yeah, mostly the pushy requirement to click "I agree" before doing anything else is for appearances' sake and for their convenience later if they want to prove in court that you were bound by it.

Are these things that work on a Mac? I want to delete all the content without deleting the journal (because some people are still holdouts and won't come here), and I really don't want to manually edit and delete every entry. That would take a year.

Thanks for this. I still begrudge agreeing to the TOS long enough to delete my LJ account. (I'm hesitant to only delete content--the entries are all migrated, though I'll lose comments--because it sounds like the TOS include liability for getting your account hacked and used.)

I feel like I'm missing something. To quote someone elsewhere, "you're asked to agree to a TOS in English, which is noted to not be a legally binding document. The "legally binding document" is in Russian, and since I can't read Russian, there's not way it would hold up in a court of law, since I would be asked to agree to something I can't understand."

How is this any worse than it has been before? What changed that everyone is so alarmed?

"In respect of any Content which constitutes intellectual property, User provides to the Administration a non-exclusive (simple) license to use his/her Content in order to provide the Service by reproducing his/her Content as well as by making it public for the entire period the Content is posted on the Service. If User participates in any rankings or if User’s Content is used in any editorial projects of the Service, User provides to the Administration an additional authorisation to modify, shorten and amend his/her Content, to add images, a preamble, comments or any clarifications to his/her Content while using it, and in certain cases based on the Service functions, an authorisation to use User’s Content anonymously."

I am honestly counting my blessings that I ran an import-to-DW (including comments etc) a week ago and so have little that is irretrievable. But yeah. I am sad about this. LJ was my family and home for a while, and my memory-keeper for a long long time.

I love that you have to accept the TOS even to delete your account. It's ridiculous. And the apologists also had me a bit upset, and... it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that they're all straight, white, "able bodied" cis and mostly men or extremely well-off women and... it's all a bit disheartening. I just can't summon the words to express how I feel about it.

I've spent the last two hours trying to find the best way to bulk-delete the individual entries; I'd been planning on it for a while, but kept putting it off. I finally got lj-sec functioning on my work machine after some dotnet madness, so I can mass delete 19 years worth of content (16 with LJ, three from a private "online journal" from a previous domain.) Fingers crossed!